1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to backup of computer systems and, more particularly, but not by way of limitation, to non-redundant backup of computer systems on a cluster of backup servers.
2. History of Related Art
As computing and networking technologies continue to improve in performance and capabilities at a lower cost, more computing is performed on computers that are constantly mobile (e.g., laptops and cell phones) or found at remote sites (e.g., servers operated at remote offices). Backup, restore and archiving operations are best performed from remote or mobile computers back to a centralized data center. However, an amount of local-disk storage for these computers increases at a rate over time that is higher than an increase in an amount of backup storage and an amount of network bandwidth available to the centralized data center.
Deduplication of redundant data on the centralized data center is one way of mitigating the amount of backup storage that is necessary. However, standard deduplication technologies fail to address network-bandwidth concerns. In addition, deduplication is a performance-intensive process that considerably increases demand on computing resources, including processing power. Therefore, computer-resource requirements for standard deduplication technologies are increasing at an unsustainable rate.